Maurice Sendak’s “Nutcracker” (& Some Recollections)
With the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Sendak reimagined this holiday classic (from the Los Angeles Times)
“The Nutcracker Suite” is a holiday workhorse, the bread and butter of dance companies across the nation. Several years ago, I took my daughter (then at the age when many a girl has a tutu in her closet) to see a performance of the Tchaikovsky ballet in a large Eastern city. She was delighted by the spectacle and by the lemonade served at intermission. I was bored to irritation: The adult professionals moved with a wooden perfunctoriness that announced, “I’m embarrassed to be dancing this cliché, but it pays the bills.”
It is easy to imagine, then, why Maurice Sendak first declined the invitation of Kent Stowell to design sets and costumes for the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company’s production of “The Nutcracker.” To be sure, Sendak had already made the transition from children’s books (as the author of such celebrated works as “Where the Wild things Are”) to opera (creating designs in Brussels, New York and, notably, in Houston where his “The Magic Flute” received considerable attention). Still, “Who needed another ‘Nutcracker’?” Sendak honestly asked. But Stowell explained his desire to do something new, to go beyond the Sugar Plum additions of recent years to…
